Insomniac Player

The instant Damien stepped inside the castle, he stopped. "...Holy cow?"

The entrance hall alone dwarfed Saint Mary’s Orphanage entirely. Rows of marble pillars stretched off into the distance, holding up a ceiling nearly twenty meters overhead. Crimson banners hung from every wall, and rusted chandeliers cast a dim orange glow across polished stone.

None of that was what stopped him, though. Doors. Hundreds of them. Left, right, straight ahead, even the balconies on the upper floors were lined with them. Less a castle, more a maze wearing one as a costume.

He looked up. Five floors between him and the throne room.

"...None of this was in the reports." No wonder several hundred teams had failed before him. Reaching the castle had never been the real test. Finding the room itself was.

He tried the nearest door.

Click.

A long hallway opened up on the other side, lined with more doors. He picked one and found another corridor behind it. Another door. Another hallway. The castle kept folding back into itself like it was built to do exactly that.

Five minutes later he was standing in the same spot he’d started from.

"...Seriously." He rubbed his forehead. "This whole place is a trap."

His pulse ticked up a notch. The fight outside wasn’t going to hold forever, and he didn’t have the time to wander this maze door by door. He tried a different route. Different hallways, different doors, same dead end waiting at the other side of every one of them. The whole castle looked engineered to burn a stranger’s time.

He leaned against a wall and exhaled. "...Think. Every puzzle leaves a clue somewhere."

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and sneezed before he’d even registered why. Fine gray dust coated the back of his hand. A thin strand of spider web clung to his fingers.

He froze. "...Spider webs?"

He looked back at the door he’d just come through. Dust settled thick across the handle, cobwebs strung across the hinge, completely untouched.

Then it clicked into place. "...I see." A quiet laugh escaped him. "Almost had me."

This wasn’t set dressing. It was a tell. Doors used regularly don’t gather dust, don’t hold cobwebs intact across the frame. Which meant nearly every corridor in this castle had never actually been walked.

"They’re fake."

He abandoned the blind search entirely and started moving fast, checking each door in passing rather than opening every one. Dust. Cobwebs. Untouched, untouched, untouched. He kept Shadow Dash in reserve on purpose; the cooldown sat at a full hour, and if something went wrong once he reached the Lord, that burst of speed might be the only thing standing between him and dying in a throne room. Better to save it than waste it on a hallway.

His footsteps echoed on and on through the empty castle. Then he stopped.

"This one."

Clean. No dust, no webbing anywhere along the frame. The brass knocker had worn through its paint down to bright bare metal, the kind of wear that only came from a hand touching it again and again.

He smiled. "Found you."

He pushed it open.

CREEAAK

A narrow spiral staircase climbed away into the dark on the other side.

"The real path." He started up without a second thought.

◇◇◇

Outside, the battlefield had gone fully chaotic, steel ringing against steel, explosions cracking the earth every few seconds.

Doctor Smoke’s group had pulled the entire town’s attention onto themselves, exactly the way the plan called for.

Naked Nun stood laughing in the middle of the street, blindfold fluttering with no wind to explain it. An Elite Knight closed on her, sword already falling.

She grinned, wild. "Fight, fight harder."

The weapon that came up in her hands wasn’t what Damien had pictured. His eyes went wide. "Holy shit."

Nearly six feet of blade, black in a way that didn’t look like dark steel so much as an absence of light entirely. Something that size should have needed both her arms and her whole back to lift, and she carried it like it weighed nothing at all, hugging the flat of it once, almost tender. "My precious."

The knight swung first. She answered with one motion.

SHING!

The black blade moved faster than something that heavy had any right to. It went through helmet and neck in the same stroke. The head hit the ground before the body registered it was dead, black smoke pouring out of the empty armor left standing.

➤[Elite Knight Lv.20 Eliminated.]

➤[Experience +299]

A second knight came in faster, angrier, longsword aimed at her shoulder.

CLANG!

The massive blade caught it without effort. She twisted her wrists, sliding his sword harmlessly off to the side, then raised her own overhead. "...Amen."

It came down.

BOOM!

The knight split clean down the middle, armor and body both, the two halves collapsing separately as black smoke rose and dissolved into nothing.

◇◇◇

Halfway up the staircase, Damien caught the whole exchange through a castle window.

"...Damn. She’s strong." That sword alone probably outweighed him. She’d swung it like it was a stick she’d picked up off the ground.

He made himself a quiet promise never to comment on her outfit again.

His eyes moved on. The knight Doctor Smoke had punched through a house earlier had gotten back up, the crater from that first hit still dented deep into its breastplate. It charged again, roaring.

Doctor Smoke sighed. "...Persistent bastard." She flicked her cigarette away and vanished, faster than even he could track. She reappeared directly in front of the knight, her mechanical fist already glowing, blue veins of energy climbing up the metal plating.

➤[Skill Activated: Internal Turmoil]

She punched.

BOOOOOOOM!!

Same spot as before. The already-weakened breastplate caved inward completely, a hole punched clean through the chest behind it. For a second, nothing happened.

Then black smoke burst out of the armor all at once. The knight dropped to one knee, sword slipping from a hand that had already stopped holding anything alive, and the empty shell crashed to the ground a heartbeat later.

Damien swallowed. "She punched the life out through plate armor." Combat Chirurgeon. Whatever that class actually did, it wasn’t medicine, not in any sense he understood the word.

Movement caught his eye. Dozens of ordinary knights poured in from the surrounding streets, fifty, then another fifty behind them, a full company closing in together.

"If they surround the group—" His hand tightened on the window frame.

Madam Marvel lifted her staff before he could finish the thought. The crystal at its tip flared, and a web of magic circles bloomed across the ground beneath the incoming knights.

➤[Skill Activated: Earth Wall]

RUMBLE!!

A wall of raw stone tore up out of the earth, fifteen meters high, sealing the reinforcements off from the fight entirely. Knights slammed into it, tried climbing, tried finding a way around. None of them found one.

"...That’s incredible."

One Elite Knight cleared the wall in a single leap, sword aimed straight at Madam Marvel. She didn’t even glance up, focus still locked on holding the barrier.

The knight smiled behind his helmet, certain of the kill.

BANG!

A gunshot cracked across Ironfall loud enough to rattle the window Damien stood behind. The knight’s helmet came apart mid-air, the body still traveling another meter before it dropped.

He searched for the shooter and found DeluluGirl on a rooftop, grinning, a sniper rifle nearly as tall as she was braced against her shoulder, smoke curling off the barrel.

"Bullseye!" She cheered, and the rifle dissolved into blue light and vanished back into her inventory.

Damien stared. "...A sniper." He genuinely couldn’t decide whether to laugh or be impressed. Maybe both. The girl who’d introduced herself with a meme name and grabbed his hand like they’d been friends for years had just dropped a Level Twenty Elite Knight from several hundred meters out without a single miss.

He shook his head slowly and kept climbing, glancing back once more through the window before the stairwell curved out of sight. Four women, holding an entire town’s worth of soldiers back without giving up a single step of ground.

"...They’ll manage." He turned and kept moving, footsteps echoing up toward the third floor.